“Why are you telling me this now?” Alex asked.
“Because if you see him – if Yassen is anywhere near Sayle Enterprises – I want you to contact us at once.”
“And then?”
“We’ll pull you out. If Yassen finds out you’re working for us, he’ll kill you too.”
Alex smiled. “I’m too young to interest him,” he said.
“No.” Mrs Jones took the photograph back. “Just remember, Alex Rider, you’re never too young to die.”
Alex stood up.
“You’ll leave tomorrow morning at eight o’clock,” Mrs Jones said. “Be careful, Alex. And good luck.”
Alex walked across the hangar, his footsteps echoing. Behind him, Mrs Jones unwrapped a peppermint and slipped it into her mouth. Her breath always smelt faintly of mint. As Head of Special Operations, how many men had she sent to their deaths? Ian Rider and maybe dozens more. Perhaps it was easier for her if her breath was sweet.
There was a movement ahead of him and he saw that the parachutists had got back from their jump. They were walking towards him out of the darkness, with Wolf and the other men from K Unit right at the front. Alex tried to step round them but he found Wolf blocking his way.
“You’re leaving,” Wolf said. Somehow he must have heard that Alex’s training was over.
“Yes.”
There was a long pause. “What happened on the plane…” he began.
“Forget it, Wolf,” Alex said. “Nothing happened. You jumped and I didn’t, that’s all.”
Wolf held out a hand. “I want you to know … I was wrong about you. I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time. But you’re all right. And maybe … one day it would be good to work with you.”
“You never know,” Alex said.
They shook.
“Good luck, Cub.”
“Goodbye Wolf.”
Alex walked out into the night.
PHYSALIA PHYSALIS
The silver-grey Mercedes SL600 cruised down the motorway, travelling south. Alex was sitting in the front passenger seat, with so much soft leather around him that he could barely hear the 389-horsepower, 6-litre engine that was carrying him towards the Sayle complex near Port Tallon, Cornwall. But at eighty miles per hour, the engine was only idling. Alex could feel the power of the car. One hundred thousand pounds’ worth of German engineering. One touch from the thin, unsmiling chauffeur and the Mercedes would leap forward. This was a car that sneered at speed limits.
Alex had been collected that morning from a converted church in Hampstead, north London. This was where Felix Lester lived. When the driver had arrived, Alex had been waiting with his luggage and there’d even been a woman – an MI6 operative – kissing him, telling him to clean his teeth, waving goodbye. As far as the driver was concerned, Alex was Felix. That morning Alex had read through the file and knew that Lester went to a school called St Anthony’s, had two sisters and a pet Labrador. His father was an architect. His mother designed jewellery. A happy family – his family if anybody asked.
“How far is it to Port Tallon?” he asked.
So far the driver had barely spoken a word. He answered Alex without looking at him. “A few hours. You want some music?”
“Got any John Lennon?” That wasn’t his choice. According to the file, Felix Lester liked John Lennon.
“No.”
“Forget it. I’ll get some sleep.”
He needed the sleep. He was still exhausted from the training and wondered how he would explain all the half-healed cuts and bruises if anyone saw under his shirt. Maybe he’d tell them he got bullied at school. He closed his eyes and allowed the leather to suck him into sleep.
It was the feeling of the car slowing down that woke him. He opened his eyes and saw a fishing village, the blue sea beyond, a swathe of rolling green hills and a cloudless sky. It was a picture off a jigsaw puzzle, or perhaps a holiday brochure advertising a forgotten England. Seagulls swooped and cried overhead. An old tug – tangled nets, smoke and flaking paint – pulled into the quay. A few locals, fishermen and their wives, stood around, watching. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon and the village was caught in the silvery, fragile light that comes at the end of a perfect spring day.
“Port Tallon,” the driver said. He must have noticed Alex opening his eyes.
“It’s pretty.”
“Not if you’re a fish.”
They drove round the edge of the village and back inland, down a lane that twisted between strangely bumpy fields. Alex saw the ruins of buildings, half-crumbling chimneys and rusting metal wheels, and knew that he was looking at an old tin mine. They’d mined tin in Cornwall for three thousand years until one day the tin had run out. Now all that was left were the holes.
A couple of kilometres down the lane a linked metal fence sprang up. It was brand-new, ten metres high, topped with razor wire. Arc lamps on scaffolding towers stood at regular intervals and there were huge signs, red on white. You could have read them from the next county.
“Trespassers will be shot,” Alex muttered to himself. He remembered what Mrs Jones had told him. He’s more or less got his own private army. He’s acting as if he’s got something to hide. Well, that was certainly his own first impression. The whole complex was somehow shocking, alien to the sloping hills and fields.
The car reached the main gate, where there was a security cabin and an electronic barrier. A guard in a blue and grey uniform with SE printed on his jacket waved them through. The barrier lifted automatically. And then they were following a long, straight road over a stretch of land that had somehow been hammered flat, with an airstrip on one side and a cluster of four high-tech buildings on the other. The buildings were large, smoked glass and steel, each one joined to the next by a covered walkway. There were two aircraft next to the landing-strip. A helicopter and a small cargo plane. Alex was impressed. The whole complex must have been about five kilometres square. It was quite an operation.
The Mercedes came to a roundabout with a fountain at the centre, swept round it and continued up towards a fantastic, sprawling house. It was Victorian, red brick topped with copper domes and spires that had long ago turned green. There must have been at least sixty windows on the five floors facing the drive. It was a house that just didn’t know when to stop.
The Mercedes pulled up at the main entrance and the driver got out. “Follow me.”
“What about my luggage?” Alex asked.
“It’ll be brought.”
Alex and the driver went through the front door and into a hall dominated by a huge canvas – Judgement Day, the end of the world, painted four centuries ago as a swirling mass of doomed souls and demons. There were works of art everywhere. Watercolours and oils, prints, drawings, sculptures in stone and bronze, all crowded together with nowhere for the eye to rest. Alex followed the driver along a carpet so thick that he almost bounced. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic and was relieved when they passed through a door and into a vast room that was practically bare.
“Mr Sayle will be here shortly,” the driver said, and left.
Alex looked around him. This was a modern room with a curving steel desk near the centre, carefully positioned halogen lights and a spiral staircase leading down from a perfect circle cut in the ceiling high above. One entire wall consisted of a single sheet of glass and, walking over to it, Alex realized that he was looking at a gigantic aquarium. The sheer size of the thing drew him towards it. It was hard to imagine how many thousands of litres of water the glass held back, but he was surprised to see that the tank was empty. There were no fish, although it was big enough to hold a shark.
And then something moved in the turquoise shadows and Alex gasped with a mixture of horror and wonderment as the biggest jellyfish he had ever seen drifted into view. The main body of the creature was a shimmering, pulsating mass of white and mauve, shaped roughly like a cone. Beneath it, a mass of tentacles covered with circular stingers twisted in the water, at le
ast ten metres long. As the jellyfish moved, or drifted in an artificial current, its tentacles writhed against the glass so that it looked almost as if it was trying to break out. It was the single most awesome and repulsive thing Alex had ever seen.
“Physalia physalis.” The voice came from behind him and Alex twisted round to see a man coming down the last of the stairs.
Herod Sayle was short. He was so short that Alex’s first impression was that he was looking at a reflection that had somehow been distorted. In his immaculate and expensive black suit, with gold signet-ring and brightly polished black shoes, he looked like a scaled-down model of a multi-millionaire businessman. His skin was very dark, so that his teeth flashed when he smiled. He had a round, bald head and very horrible eyes. The grey irises were too small, completely surrounded by white. Alex was reminded of tadpoles before they hatch. When Sayle stood next to him, the eyes were almost at the same level as his and held less warmth than the jellyfish.
“The Portuguese man-o’-war,” Sayle continued. He had a heavy accent brought with him from the Beirut marketplace. “It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t keep one as a pet,” Alex said.
“I came upon this one when I was diving in the South China Sea.” Sayle gestured at a glass display case and Alex noticed three harpoon guns and a collection of knives resting in velvet slots. “I love to kill fish,” Sayle went on. “But when I saw this specimen of Physalia physalis, I knew I had to capture it and keep it. You see, it reminds me of myself.”
“It’s ninety-nine per cent water. It has no brain, no guts and no anus.” Alex had dredged up the facts from somewhere and spoken them before he knew what he was doing.
Sayle glanced at him, then turned back to the creature hovering over him in its tank. “It’s an outsider,” he said. “It drifts on its own, ignored by the other fish. It is silent and yet it demands respect. You see the nematocysts, Mr Lester? The stinging cells? If you were to find yourself wrapped in those, it would be an exquisite death.”
“Call me Alex,” Alex said.
He’d meant to say Felix, but somehow it had slipped out. It was the most stupid, the most amateurish mistake he could have made. But he had been thrown by the way Sayle had appeared and by the slow, hypnotic dance of the jellyfish.
The grey eyes squirmed. “I thought your name was Felix.”
“My friends call me Alex.”
“Why?”
“After Alex Ferguson. I’m a big fan of Manchester United.” It was the first thing Alex could think of. But he’d seen a football poster in Felix Lester’s bedroom and knew that at least he’d chosen the right team.
Sayle smiled. “That’s most amusing. Alex it shall be. And I hope we will be friends, Alex. You are a very lucky boy. You won the competition and you are going to be the first teenager to try out my Stormbreaker. But this is also lucky, I think, for me. I want to know what you think of it. I want you to tell me what you like … what you don’t.” The eyes dipped away and suddenly he was business-like. “We have only three days until the launch,” he said. “We’d better get a bliddy move on, as my father used to say. I’ll have my man take you to your room and tomorrow morning, first thing, you must get to work. There’s a maths program you should try … also languages. All the software was developed here at Sayle Enterprises. Of course, we’ve talked to children. We’ve gone to teachers, to education experts. But you, my dear … Alex. You will be worth more to me than all of them put together.”
As he had talked, Sayle had become more and more animated, carried away by his own enthusiasm. He had become a completely different man. Alex had to admit that he’d taken an immediate dislike to Herod Sayle. No wonder Blunt and the people at MI6 mistrusted him! But now he was forced to think again. He was standing opposite one of the richest men in England, a man who had decided, out of the goodness of his heart, to give a huge gift to British schools. Just because he was small and slimy, that didn’t necessarily make him an enemy. Perhaps Blunt was wrong after all.
“Ah! Here’s my man now,” Sayle said. “And about bliddy time!”
The door had opened and a man had come in, dressed in the black suit and tails of an old-fashioned butler. He was as tall and thin as his master was short and round, with a thatch of ginger hair above a face so pale it was almost paper white. From a distance it had looked as if he was smiling, but as he drew closer Alex gasped. The man had two horrendous scars, one on each side of his mouth, twisting up all the way to his ears. It was as if someone had attempted to cut his face in half. The scars were a gruesome shade of mauve. There were smaller, fainter scars where his cheeks had once been stitched.
“This is Mr Grin,” Sayle said. “He changed his name after his accident.”
“Accident?” Alex found it hard not to stare at the terrible wounds.
“Mr Grin used to work in a circus. It was a novelty knife-throwing act. For the climax he used to catch a spinning knife between his teeth, but then one night his elderly mother came to see the show. She waved to him from the front row and he got his timing wrong. He’s worked for me for a dozen years now and although his appearance may be displeasing, he is loyal and efficient. Don’t try to talk with him, by the way. He has no tongue.”
“Eeeurgh!” Mr Grin said.
“Nice to meet you,” Alex muttered.
“Take him to the blue room,” Sayle commanded. He turned to Alex. “You’re fortunate that one of our nicest rooms has come up free – here, in the house. We had a security man staying there. But he left us quite suddenly.”
“Oh? Why was that?” Alex asked casually.
“I have no idea. One moment he was here, the next he was gone.” Sayle smiled again. “I hope you won’t do the same, Alex.”
“Ri … wurgh!” Mr Grin gestured at the door and, leaving Herod Sayle standing in front of his huge captive, Alex left the room.
He was led along a passage past more works of art, up a staircase and then along a wide corridor with thick wood-panelled doors and chandeliers. Alex assumed that the main house was used for entertaining. Sayle himself must live here. But the computers would be constructed in the modern buildings he had seen opposite the airstrip. Presumably he would be taken there tomorrow.
His room was at the far end. It was a large room with a four-poster bed and a window looking out on to the fountain. Darkness had fallen and the water, cascading ten metres through the air over a semi-naked statue that looked remarkably like Herod Sayle, was eerily illuminated by a dozen concealed lights. Next to the window was a table with an evening meal already laid out for him: ham, cheese, salad. His bag was lying on the bed.
He went over to it – a Nike sports bag – and examined it. When he had closed it up, he had inserted three hairs into the zip, trapping them in the metal teeth. They were no longer there. Alex opened the bag and went through it. Everything was exactly as it had been when he had packed, but he was certain that the sports bag had been expertly and methodically searched.
He took out the Nintendo DS, inserted the Speed Wars cartridge and pressed the START button three times. At once the top screen lit up with a green rectangle, the same shape as the room. He lifted the Nintendo up and swung it around him, following the line of the walls. A red flashing dot suddenly appeared on the top screen. He walked forward, holding the Nintendo in front of him. The dot flashed faster, more intensely. He had reached a picture, hanging next to the bathroom, a squiggle of colours that looked suspiciously like a Picasso. He put the Nintendo down and carefully lifted the canvas off the wall. The bug was taped behind it, a black disc about the size of a ten pence piece. Alex looked at it for a minute, wondering why it was there. Security? Or was Sayle such a control freak that he had to know what his guests were doing every minute of the day and night?
Alex put the picture back. There was only one bug in the room. The bathroom was clean.
He ate his dinner, showered and got ready for bed. As he passed the window, he noticed activity in the g
rounds near the fountain. There were lights shining out of the modern buildings. Three men, all dressed in white overalls, were driving towards the house in an open-top Jeep. Two more men walked past. These were security guards, dressed in the same uniform as the man at the gate. They were both carrying semi-automatic machine-guns. Not just a private army, but a well-armed one.
He got into bed. The last person who had slept here had been his uncle, Ian Rider. Had he seen something, looking out of the window? Had he heard something? What could have happened that meant he had to die?
Sleep took a long time coming to the dead man’s bed.
LOOKING FOR TROUBLE
Alex saw it the moment he opened his eyes. It would have been obvious to anyone who slept in the bed, but of course nobody had slept there since Ian Rider had been killed. It was a triangle of white slipped into a fold in the canopy above the four-poster bed. You had to be lying on your back to see it – like Alex was now.
It was out of his reach. He had to balance a chair on the mattress and then stand on the chair to reach it. Wobbling, almost falling, he finally managed to trap it between his fingers and pull it out.
In fact it was a square of paper, folded twice. Someone had drawn on it, a strange design with what looked like a reference number beneath it.
There wasn’t very much of it, but Alex recognized Ian Rider’s handwriting. But what did it mean? He pulled on some clothes, went over to the table and took out a sheet of plain paper. Quickly, he wrote a brief message in block capitals.
Then he found his Nintendo DS, inserted the Nemesis cartridge into the back, turned it on and passed the bottom screen over the two sheets of paper, scanning first his message and then the design. Instantaneously, he knew, a machine would click on in Mrs Jones’s office in London and a copy of the two pages would scroll out of the back. Maybe she could work it out. She was, after all, meant to work for Intelligence.
Finally, Alex turned off the Nintendo then removed the back and hid the folded paper in the battery compartment. The diagram had to be important. Ian Rider had hidden it. Maybe it was what had cost him his life.